Pandora is a free internet radio station which "streams" songs to your internet browser. This means you can't download the music - you can only listen to it via Pandora. So all you anti-downloading activists out there can calm down before you burst a blood vessel.

What makes Pandora really good is that you can set up your own personal radio station and then you can specify what music you like to listen to. Pandora will then play you other music which it thinks is similar to your tastes. You can rate each song to tell Pandora whether you liked it or not. The site will then use your positive / negative ratings to tailor your future music playlist. So eventually it learns what you like to listen to and not listen to. If you really don't like the song currently playing, you can skip to the next song, just like you would on a CD player.

The sound quality is excellent and there's even a link to buy the song on iTunes if you like it enough to pay for it.

The site has already got me interested in Billy Idol and Def Leppard, both of which I am currently looking at on iTunes.

So if you're stuck for new music to listen to, I recommend you give Pandora a try. The only downside is that due to Pandora's music licence, you can only skip past 5 songs a hour. After that, you have to listen to the song whether you like it or not.

I know, it's embarrassing. I haven't blogged here in over a month but it's really been a hectic month. If you don't include Christmas and New Year, I've also had internet connection issues, health problems, I've had a serious falling-out with several of my clients and I have started a new project (like I didn't have enough projects already to do!). Then yesterday I started guitar lessons. So you could say I have had my hands pretty full in the past month.

The new project is a website called BookJunkies. I decided to do a book website because first of all, I love to read (that's a pretty good reason right there!). Second, I bought a book from Amazon called "The Complete Robot" by Isaac Asimov and within a day or two of starting to read it, the cover split right down the middle (some doofus with a knife seems to have used the book to lean on when cutting something and when I bent the cover back to read the pages, the splits widened and cracked the cover wide open). Anyway, I went searching online with my good buddy, Mr Google, and found virtually zilch about basic book repair (and what there was was total crap). I subscribe to 7 or 8 book blogs and the authors of these blogs didn't know anything about book repair either. Their attitude was that it wasn't worth repairing a book because the cost of getting a replacement copy is now really cheap. That kind of attitude really gets my goat up because I am a big believer in valuing and caring for books and I detest this "chuck it away" attitude that people now seem to have. I am a big believer in buying a book, taking good care of it and repairing it if it becomes damaged.

So BookJunkies will also cover tips such as basic repair and also issues such as how to spot a fake author signature, a glossary of book terms and much more. The site isn't up yet as it is currently being designed on my computer but I hope to get it uploaded and launched by around February 1st (but that might be delayed). As I explained to one email correspondent this week, I am transferring all my Amazon reviews to the site, expanding on the reviews to include more detail, adding photos of the book covers, adding Amazon affiliate links for three Amazon sites and setting up the newsletter and blog. But what's hindering me is that I have to do it in between regular paying work and other stuff. I can't commit all my time to it. At the beginning at least, it's going to be a hobby and a sideline, a labour of love.

BookJunkies will also help to promote self-published authors by giving them a profile page, links to their work and reviews of their work (provided they send me free copies for me to read). So their advantage is the extra exposure and my advantage is that I get to read more and also run a new website (which is also fun in itself).

The freelance writing business has been pretty slow recently. I hate falling out with clients but when the rot sets in, what can you do? You can either tolerate it or say something and I chose to say something. Others might stay silent but I have enough stress in my life without clients making any more stress for me. Friends have counselled me to think of the money and not think so much about where the money comes from, but I came to the conclusion a long time ago that there's more to life than money. One blogger recently said (after being fired by his company) that he could only do things in life that he enjoyed and when you stop enjoying what you do then it's time to move on in life - that's what I want to be like too. I only want to do enjoyable things, things that make me want to get up in the morning and get started. So hopefully BookJunkies will be the start of that because it's a project that I really believe in. Throw in the guitar lessons which I have been wanting to start for 7 years and you could say that I am taking some really positive steps towards making 2007 a year to remember.

The next step is to kick-start my German lessons and improve my spoken German but that is slightly more complicated because I have a mental block on the German right now. After 6 years of living here, you could say I am all washed out with the German learning. That's why I wanted to learn the guitar because it gives my brain something new to try. Later my mind might be more receptive to going back to the German again.

Best get back to guitar practice now. My guitar is temporarily broken so I am using the guitar from my girlfriend's father for the moment. His guitar is slightly bigger and much nicer so that has got me thinking about buying a new guitar soon (but after seeing the prices, I am a little shell-shocked. The guitar I would like is only 500 Euros! Aaaaghh!). Anyway, I have to do E minor and E major, as well as memorise the strings and training my fingers to jump from string to string at random). My fingers don't respond too well at the best of times (medication does that to you) so it is quite a trial trying to get your fingers to obey you. But I'll keep labouring on! I'll practice my chords while listening to some guitar music for inspiration. Yesterday I went to iTunes and downloaded "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin and I am dusting off the Simon & Garfunkel tracks especially "Sound of Silence". I don't delude myself that I can play like that anytime in the next few years but it doesn't hurt to have some inspiration to keep going when the fingers hurt from pushing down on the strings all the time.